Health Insurance benefits

[SoulDoubt]

Does your current health insurance allow you to meet with a nutritionist and/or a sports physician for working out? I cannot get a straight answer out of my health insurance company....

[Bulwark]

No, but it's always good to have insurance, just in case. I've always thought it interesting that insurance pays billions for pills, but won't pay $300 for a gym membership to prevent problems.

[Pelon]

My recent fitness test was an allowable expense under my medical savings account rules, but it would only be covered by my insurance if it had been prescribed by my doctor to check for a heart condition. With my current fitness level, there was no way that was going to happen. I would expect most insurance plans are the same. If they had discovered some type of abnormality during the test, they may have paid for it, but I doubt it. Hopefully I'll never find out.

I see a sports medicine doctor when I have sports injuries, but I doubt my primary care physician would give me a referral for general information. Nutritional counseling would only be covered if there was a specific disease that required it. General nutritional counseling isn't covered. I consider my insurance plan to be pretty good, so I doubt many companies would cover these types of things.

[.V.]

Most won't because they consider it wasted money. To pay for expensive nutrition counseling to be ignored and gym memberships which are going to be unused.

[jtr55]

Most health insurance plans will not cover the expense of nutrition counseling and gym memberships although some of them are starting to come around. I have heard that Humana Insurance company is starting to offer some type of gym memberships discount to its members though (not positive but that is just what I have heard - Im from FL).

If you have a health savings account though you may be able to pay for quite a few of these types of things as a qualified medical expense. The definition of qualified medical expenses by the IRS is quite broad (I ahve even heard of people being able to use distributions from an HSA for LASIK).